


Where Roads Must End

by ScriveSpinster



Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar
Genre: Endings, Ex-Urchins, Gen, POV Second Person, The Nadir, Urchins - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-03
Updated: 2019-03-03
Packaged: 2019-11-08 09:35:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17978867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScriveSpinster/pseuds/ScriveSpinster
Summary: None can hope to halt what comes, but there are places where one might outlast it.





	Where Roads Must End

It’s the children who gather first.

They’re a ragged crew, for the most part, thinner than they should be and never less than half-wild. Others are better fed, wearing sturdier clothes – called from orphanages, perhaps, or friends to those of the rooftops – but all of them, wild or not, look to their leaders: a birthmarked boy, a girl wearing a lightning-patterned scarf, a waif with violet eyes who watches and seldom speaks. And all of them make a camp of the Forgotten Quarter, roosting on the rooftops in a sea of scavenged light: candle stubs and glim-lights, paraffin lamps casting little bright circles on stones left centuries undisturbed. Where there had been silence, dust-laden temples now echo with scuffles and games – but the urchin gangs are quieter here than they had been in the living city, and rhymes and whispers pass among them like wind: _leave your supper and leave your sleep_ , _the winds are wild, the lacre deep_ , _if your heels be nimble and your toes be light_ –

Some depart, and return with others in tow. Some bring supplies. Some carry the names of other cities, truth tangled up in rumor and uncertainty – Paris, Kyoto, Moscow, Vienna.

 _Falling down,_ the sing-song whisper goes. _Falling down, falling down. London bridge is falling down. All fall to lacre._

.

In time, others arrive: tradesfolk and criminals, mostly, standing together in little groups, talking low among themselves. Some are more richly dressed – silken waistcoats and mahogany walking sticks, lace-cuffed gowns and sapphire jewelry. These few linger at the fringes, as if unsure of their welcome. Nobody calls them closer. Nobody turns them away.

In ones and twos, they come, soldiers and thieves, Noughts and Crosses, drawn by a thread of rumor passed from orphan to orphan through the streets of London. A woman in a baker’s apron still caked with flour hands out biscuits to grubby children like the girl she used to be, not letting herself think of the shop she built and left behind. A broken-nosed tough years too tall for the Fisher Kings he used to run with holds his infant daughter in his arms, wondering what the world beneath will make of her. Near day’s end, a woman in rags steps past the camp’s unspoken perimeter, blinking in the light as if lost; her arms are wrapped in bandages brown with dried blood, her visible skin a constellation-map of scars, and folk mutter and draw back at the sight of her – until one of the silk-clad ones takes her arm and leads her to stand with them, speaking quietly. It’s impossible to hear what he says to her, but his tone is gentle, and carries the cadence of song.

Over it all hangs an air of reunion, not quite sad but never quite celebratory, as one-time friends and familiar strangers trade spore toffee and reminiscences to shake off the chill of calamity waiting. And you’re there too, in the midst of that crowd, counting down to the fall of another stolen city. Perhaps you were a denizen of the rooftops once yourself. Perhaps you were only kind to them in a way that was remembered. Either way, through chance or choice, something earned you this: the flash of a scarf, a tug on your sleeve, a word of warning. A missing purse, too, but that’s to be expected. _Five for silver. Six for gold._ One way or another, everyone here has paid their way.

.

Night falls, or something like it, bringing campfires and revelry, tea in cracked mugs and skewers of roasted meat and too much time to wonder whether the choice you’re making is the right one, or only one oblivion traded for another.

“Be sorry to see the old place go,” a dragsman says, and a woman in constable’s blues snorts. 

“Look around you,” she says, indicating fountains, statues, ruins. “Ain’t all gone.”

Maybe she’s right. The Forgotten Quarter is long empty of those who used to live here, but stone remains and earth remembers, and some of those once-bright windows do feel like they have ghosts behind them.

Where you’re going, there will be nothing but ghosts, but here, firelight still brightens the eyes of stone soldiers and glances off pools of mirror-still water. Urchins still chase each other across the rooftops, and two pickpockets dance a turn to the words of a dirge sung to the tune of a wedding reel. You drink your thin tea and listen, watch the dancers and think of anything but time. Most of the other revelers seem to feel the same – but somewhere not far distant, you can hear an elegant woman speaking to the Violet-eyed Waif.

“Will we lose ourselves down there?”she asks, clutching her blue-feathered fan too tightly. You can’t tell whether the catch in her voice is fear or yearning.

“You’ll lose something,” the girl promises. “But something will survive.”

.

And then it’s morning.

One by one, folk wake and gather, and attend to the rituals of mundanity: fires doused and packs taken up, tea distributed and last cigarettes smoked. Urchins jostle and chatter, or simply watch in silence – queer and eerie as their lot sometimes are, scared as any children would be. The woman with the fan taps it against her wrist, once-twice-once in nervous rhythm. The constable and dragsman stand with arms around each other’s waists, still wrapped in a shared blanket and waiting for departure. 

When the time comes, there’s no command, only a rustle through the crowd like breeze through dry grass: _now._

The birthmarked boy leads the procession, along a path you find curiously hard to hold in your mind – between two pagodas, past a cavalcade of stone horsemen, down an empty street that twists and spirals oddly. The children follow first, calmer than their years should allow, wide-eyed and solemn. They carry their candles and lanterns with them – a river of light flowing out from the city, leaving darkness behind them. Then the ones who had been urchins once, the whole motley lot of them, seeds thrown to the wind and reunited at the last. The girl with the scarf stands aside to let them pass, and on they go, in their winding way: down and down and down, through a stony chasm and into the space beneath. Some are silent. Some laugh and some weep. The ones in silk walk down singing – a simple tune, and mournful, high and clear in the forlorn spaces of the Forgotten Quarter; after a moment, the scarred woman lifts her rusty voice to join them.

At last, it’s your turn.

The girl with the scarf falls into step beside you as you walk, looking up with a crooked-toothed grin that falters quickly and a steady vigilance that falters not at all. You think you might have known her once, unless she only reminds you of someone else you knew, sister or cousin or long-ago friend. Either way, you’re glad that neither of you have to go alone.

The journey, in the end, is not a long one. You mark it in your memory while you can: the path angling down, the stony ground and the silence that gathers like fog, and then, abruptly, the gate to the Nadir opening before you. In your ears, the thin thread of a song not yet overcome by silence. On your face, a cold wind and a cold light, so much stranger than violet.

Fragments, then: _fire and fleet and candlelight_ echoing off cavern walls, a child’s hand small and real in your own.

Together, you descend.


End file.
